White Supremacy in the White House

 

By David K. Shipler 

            Two prominent themes of racial and ethnic antagonism have found their way into official government policies under the Trump administration. One is the longstanding belief that nonwhites are mentally inferior to whites, a stereotype dating from slavery. The other, generated more recently, is the notion that whites are the real victims, suffering discrimination under the banner of racial preferences.

            President Trump has displayed both assumptions in personal remarks and symbolic acts, and his aides have incorporated them into federal funding and programming. Not since the years of legal segregation, before the civil rights movement, has government been so dominated by the ideology of white supremacy. Not in the decades of work toward a more open society have its leaders repudiated the progress so venomously.

            Trump has demonstrated skill at tapping into the ugliest attitudes in his country, giving them voice, and cementing them in policy. Before any investigation of the fatal midair collision of an army helicopter and a passenger jet near Washington’s National Airport, he speculated that “it could have been” caused by diversity in the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA’s DEI program, Trump claimed in an executive order, “penalizes hard-working Americans who want to serve in the FAA but are unable to do so, as they lack a requisite disability or skin color.”

His executive orders ending DEI—the diversity, equity and inclusion programs that have opened broad opportunities to minorities—ride on one of the most durable stereotypes in American culture: the insidious belief that people of color, Blacks in particular, are inherently less capable than whites. That age-old image, which has fostered racial bias in hiring and promotions, now finds a comfortable home in the White House.

Since victims of racial prejudice have been favored, it seems, some whites have been competing for that victim badge, seeing themselves as deprived of the level playing field so loudly advocated by liberals fighting discrimination. A bitter grievance is nursed by some whites in or near poverty when they hear about the “white privilege” that frees the majority race of the burdens of prejudice. The resentment took on a sharp edge as whites fell into economic hardship during the Great Depression of 2008. They might have made common cause with Blacks who suffered similarly, but racial divides overcome class affinities in America.

Trump Channels America's Deepest Racism

 

By David K. Shipler 

              If you spread out on a table all the categories of stereotyping inflicted upon Blacks and other people of color throughout the history of the United States, you’ll see how some of the ugliest are being chosen and brandished by Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance. Like crude weapons of mass destruction, these instruments of bigotry cannot be precisely targeted. They wound both their intended victims and mere bystanders—and perhaps, in the end, the perpetrators themselves.

              The latest example is the poisonous lie that Haitian immigrants, who came to this country in the naïve belief that it would be a refuge of safety and opportunity, are stealing and eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio. That Trump and Vance would repeat and inflate this toxic nonsense after the city’s officials denied its truth exposes, first, their own hatred toward “others,” and second, their faith that the hatred is harbored by millions of American voters.

              The concocted story fits the longstanding American narrative of Blacks as primitive, violent, immoral, and unclean. Those supposed traits helped feed the rationalizations of slavery, persisted through the Jim Crow era of legal segregation, and continue in the barely concealed warrens of today’s right-wing electorate.

Trump has proved dangerously skillful in tapping this base bigotry. Whether by instinct or calculation, he locates and gives voice to the worst characteristics of his society. He garners broad support by his vicious fabrication that immigrants are invading as hordes of disease-ridden criminals released from prisons and mental institutions abroad. It doesn’t matter that official statistics show lower crime rates among immigrants than native-born Americans. It doesn’t matter that most are fleeing persecution and danger to the ideal that they imagine America to be. It doesn’t matter that the two would-be assassins who have targeted Trump were white Americans.

He doesn’t have to say explicitly that the hordes are swarthy; the picture in his voters’ minds is clear enough. Evidently, he says what many people think. And what they think, about Blacks in particular, has deep roots in American culture.

The stereotypes fall into five basic categories, as I saw during five years of research for my book A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America. Others may find different patterns, but in my interviewing across the country, negative images of Blacks seemed to organize themselves around these themes: Body, Mind, Morality, Violence, and Power.

The Rise of Black Quarterbacks

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

            At Sunday’s Super Bowl, the United States will congratulate itself on another racial milestone, the first time two Black quarterbacks have played in the culminating game of the country’s most popular sport. “Jalen Hurts and Patrick Mahomes will make history on Sunday,” crowed CBS News.

But the history is a lesson in bigotry, illustrating how devious stereotypes can be.

The latest “first” is a cause for celebration, to be sure. It is no exoneration of American society, however, for the racial assumptions that have made this so long in coming still whirl around Blacks, whether professional athletes or ordinary mortals. Tangible barriers that are broken often leave a strong residue of bias—in this case, about the interactions of the mind, the body, and the power of Blacks on the field or off.   

Americans love to chart progress. We have had the first Black president, the first Black vice president, the first Black defense secretary, the first Black secretary of state, the first Black Supreme Court justice, the first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and on. And now “the first Black House Minority Leader in history” as President Biden said in his State of the Union Address, congratulating Representative Hakeem Jeffries.

 Whether Jeffries was pleased or displeased by the label was hard to tell by the neutral expression on his face. Not every Black or Muslim or woman or gay person who gets past the obstacle loves being defined primarily that way. Jeffries and the rest of us might reasonably wonder if the day will ever come when the phrase “the first Black [fill in the blank]” can be relegated to a distant past.

            The first Black quarterback to start in the Superbowl was Doug Williams, who led the Washington Redskins to victory in 1988. He won the Lombardi Trophy and was named the game’s most valuable player. But he hadn’t been the team’s starter at the beginning of the season, when Black quarterbacks overall started fewer than 10 percent of NFL games. 

            Several years later, for my book A Country of Strangers, I looked into the patterns of prejudice that was keeping Black players out of the quarterback position. A system of tracking was putting high school athletes on career-changing detours, especially if they came from mostly Black schools, according to Richard L. Schaefer, former attorney for the National Football League Players Association. On college teams, he said then, talented Black quarterbacks were being bumped to other positions considered more physical than mental. “I think it’s a subtle, perhaps even subconscious, kind of bigotry.”

            The bigotry pairs two of the society’s longest-standing stereotypes of Blacks as both physically strong and mentally weak. Since at least the days of Thomas Jefferson, who codified those images in his book Notes on the State of Virginia, there has been a tendency in white America to see the body and the mind as opposite poles, perceptions that persisted and shaped college and NFL coaches’ decisions centuries later.

The Fleeting Euphoria of Racial Progress

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Again and again, we are cheated. Those of us who celebrate the embrace of justice are allowed elation only for a while. Then the inevitable bigotry awakens from what turns out to be a shallow slumber.

                The saga of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle is the latest to lift the mood and then crush it. Their royal wedding in 2018 drew an estimated 1.9 billion viewers worldwide, not only for the splendor but also for the elevation of racial inclusion: a biracial American joining the British royal family, an expansion past ancient limits into the broader world. And how fitting, given the United Kingdom’s increasing racial and ethnic diversity. We were entitled to our euphoria, as naïve as it was.

                Barack Obama gave us that, too. On election night in 2008, television screens radiated with tears for the healing of history, notably the streaming eyes of Jesse Jackson, no fan of Obama but a courier of reform. Who will forget his face? But then, the first “black” US president—also biracial—became the target of ugly caricatures and epithets, facilitating the prejudices that Donald Trump rode into the White House eight years later. Euphoria, it seems, is always stalked by hatred: Emancipation by Jim Crow, Obama by Trump, voting rights by voting suppression.

                Last year, the murders of blacks by police—nothing new, but now recorded for all to witness—propelled the largest outpouring in history of white Americans demonstrating for racial justice. In big cities and small towns across the country, week after week, whites went with blacks into the streets, driven by the terrible, long video of the white Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin kneeling fatally on the neck of the unarmed black man George Floyd.

                Not since the brutality of segregationists against nonviolent civil rights demonstrators in the 1950s and 60s had the conscience of white America been animated so intensely. It was uplifting. It brought a kind of indignant ecstasy, a declaration that Black Lives Matter, meaning of course that black lives also matter, that black lives matter, too, not just white lives, that too often have black lives been seen as not to matter. Pride in this arousal of morality was not allowed to last long enough.